Blog

CIA, Mob team up to topple Fidel Castro in Paramount Plus docuseries ‘Mafia Spies’

July 29, 2024

The CIA’s alliance with the Mafia during the Kennedy years to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro is at the center of a new Paramount Plus original docuseries called Mafia Spies. Using historical footage and contemporary interviews, the six-part series brings viewers inside 1950s wide-open Havana, when mobsters controlled the Cuban capital’s casinos, and then examines Castro’s takeover of the island nation and the U.S. government’s clandestine efforts to kill him. Among other schemes, including the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, attempts to eliminate Castro included poison pills and a scuba-diving wetsuit laced with a deadly substance. None of this was successful, ...

Learn More

The Kansas City Massacre prompted legal reforms that bolstered federal law enforcement 

On June 17, 1933, an ambush at Kansas City’s Union Station railroad depot left five men dead and two wounded….

Learn More

The airport shootout and El Chapo’s big arrest

Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka “El Chapo,” is presented to the news media at Altiplano prison in Villa de Almoloya de Juarez on June 10, 1993. Courtesy of Cipollini Collection

Learn More

Body farms unravel mysteries of human decomposition

The University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center is one of seven taphonomic research facilities, or body farms, in the United States. Remains are laid out for researchers to observe the natural decomposition process. Getty Images

Learn More

‘When Spilotro got greedy, the end was written’

Since 1980, award-winning reporter Chuck Goudie has covered the Mob and much more for ABC7 News in Chicago. He’s been…

Learn More

Meyer Lansky’s 1953 jail stint

Seventy years ago, Meyer Lansky took a legal hit in an upstate New York gambling rackets crackdown that concluded with…

Learn More

Bugsy Siegel death house for sale in Beverly Hills

The Beverly Hills, California, mansion where Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was shot to death in 1947 is on the market for…

Learn More

Spado’s ‘Accidental Gangster’ story headed to silver screen

After a childhood in upstate New York, Ori Spado embarked on a criminal career that took him from Manhattan to…

Learn More